Darwinian selection can be used to evolve robot controllers able to efficiently self-organize their tasks. Taking inspiration from the way in which ants organise their work and divide up tasks, Eliseo Ferrante and colleagues evolved complex robot behaviors using artificial evolution and detailed robotics simulations.

Just like social insects such as ants, bees or termites teams of robots display a self-organized division of labor in which the different robots automatically specialized into carrying out different subtasks in the group, says new research publishing in PLOS Computational Biology.